Natural gas fracking can make local well water explosive

Local well water in areas where fracking is used to extract natural gas …

As most forms of energy in the US have been going up in price, natural gas has gone in the opposite direction. This is largely the result of a new extraction technique called "fracking," in which fluids under high pressure are used to fracture rock formations deep underground, releasing large volumes of gas that would otherwise be trapped in small pockets. Because of relaxed regulations in some states, the process of fracking boomed before anyone had a clear perspective on its environmental consequences.

Most of the concerns about fracking have focused on the fluids involved in the process, which tend to exit the wells heavily contaminated with dissolved metals and radioactive material. But those may not be the only worries. A study, released yesterday by PNAS, now shows that fracking may be contaminating local groundwater with enough methane to pose a risk of explosion.

The problem isn't with municipal water systems, which are carefully monitored for signs of contamination. Instead, lots of fracking takes place in rural areas, where isolated houses may rely on shallow private wells for their water. Pennsylvania alone is estimated to have over a million private wells and, in some ares of the state, fracking activity has risen 27-fold in the last two years alone. To check whether the drilling activity was having an impact on local well water, a team from Duke University sampled water from 68 private wells, looking for signs of contamination.

The wells included the Catskill, Genesee, and Lockhaven formations in New York and Pennsylvania; some were in close proximity to drilling and others over 5km away. The trends were immediately clear: those within 1km of an active drilling site were much more likely to have high levels of methane, on average 17 times higher than those sites more distant from active drilling. That average covers a broad range, too. Some sites were indistinguishable from the typical inactive well, while others had concentrations of methane between 19.2 and 64 mg/l, enough to pose an explosive hazard, and high enough to qualify for hazard mitigation under the Department of the Interior's rules.

Some wells in areas more distant from active drilling did have appreciable levels of methane, so the authors looked into whether the contamination was likely to be from local biological activity or the release of deeper deposits of the gas. Based on isotope ratios and the presence of ethane and propane, they conclude that the methane from areas of active drilling is almost certainly from the drilling itself.

On the plus side, methane seemed to be the only contaminant from the drilling process that made it into these wells. There were no signs that brine from deep sources or radioactive material had made it into the local water supplies.

How did the methane get there? The simplest answer would be that the casings of the new wells are simply not sealed properly, allowing gas to leak out. Alternately, there are many old and abandoned drill sites in the area, and fracking may have opened a pathway for gas to escape into these wells. Finally, the authors suggest that the fracking process may open up natural fractures in the overlying rock formations. At this point, it's impossible to distinguish between these possibilities.

This isn't the first recent study to suggest that fracking enabled the escape of methane into the environment. A Cornell professor set of a fair bit of controversy by publishing a study that indicated that fracking released so much methane that its impact on greenhouse gas levels was worse than that of burning coal. Although some of the assumptions in that paper have come under sharp criticism, the two papers suggest that inadvertent methane release is an issue worth giving careful attention.

The authors of the new paper provide a second reason: lawsuits. "Based on our groundwater results and the litigious nature of shale-gas extraction," they conclude, "we believe that long-term, coordinated sampling and monitoring of industry and private homeowners is needed."

So if methane is the only contaminant in the water, then it doesn't really seem that bad. Couldn't you just install a vent on your water pipe at some high point? Make the gas companies pay to retrofit any private water well withing a 2 mile radius of a drill site, and the problem is more or less solved.

On a serious note I think governments are getting their act together in terms of regulating fracking. We've had a few instances where manmade chemicals have made their way into well water. Isotopes etc that don't occur naturally have been detected in the wells of people that have methane as well.

Unfortunately Oil companies don't disclose what chemicals exactly they use, and legally they don't have to, otherwise lawsuits would be a lot easier to bring against these companies.

The good news is lately a bunch of techniques have come out combining horizontal drilling and fracking that should greatly limit the amount of fracking a company would need to do. It sounds like with the new techniques methane leaks should be pretty much eliminated.

There are simply too many double entendres in the use of this term, that using one would be to open the floodgates. Surely someone knew of the connotations here? It may be immature but -- using the BSG term as reference -- the article itself reads like a set of jokes!

Don't hate me, but I kept falling asleep trying to watch BSG. I made it through the 3 hour movie intro setup, and then dozed several times through season one episode one. I just gave up, then heard the series ended like crap and didn't bother to try again.

I'm only 20% on front page image duty this week, busy on some bigger picture design stuff, so I apologize for the lack of crazy images.

On a serious note I think governments are getting their act together in terms of regulating fracking. We've had a few instances where manmade chemicals have made their way into well water. Isotopes etc that don't occur naturally have been detected in the wells of people that have methane as well.

They are dumping the contaminated water into rivers and sewage treatment plants not designed to handle radioactive substances or the chemicals they use. It is going to end up EVERYWHERE.

On a serious note I think governments are getting their act together in terms of regulating fracking. We've had a few instances where manmade chemicals have made their way into well water. Isotopes etc that don't occur naturally have been detected in the wells of people that have methane as well.

They are dumping the contaminated water into rivers and sewage treatment plants not designed to handle radioactive substances or the chemicals they use. It is going to end up EVERYWHERE.

Yeah, this is the more disconcerting side of it to me. They've been finding all sorts of seriously unpleasant stuff in the PA municipal drinking water lately. Chromium 6, that sort of stuff.

So if methane is the only contaminant in the water, then it doesn't really seem that bad. Couldn't you just install a vent on your water pipe at some high point? Make the gas companies pay to retrofit any private water well withing a 2 mile radius of a drill site, and the problem is more or less solved.

Oh, how you bring out the cynic in me!

1. Does the methane separate-out of the water as soon as it comes out of the tap - like a warm soda which has been shaken before opening - or is the release significantly slower?

2. Are we going to have waste-gas burn-off flames over -water- wells now, like they have at refineries?

3. "Make the gas companies pay to retrofit..." Really? One study is enough evidence that the "contamination" is -directly- related to the drilling/fracking, and is not a pre-exisiting condition? [because you -know- in the US of A that it would take winning a class-action lawsuit to force the drillers to pay for any retrofits]

...[because you -know- in the US of A that it would take winning a class-action lawsuit to force the drillers to pay for any retrofits]

Unfortunately, what the class-action lawsuit achieves is a settlement without admission of guilt, mega bonuses for the lawyers who brought the suit, minor bonuses for the company lawyers who settled for peanuts on what the real damages ought to have been, and coupons for 10% off home delivery of bottled water for the homeowners.

I live in Pennsylvania and have been following this pretty closely. The arguments remind me a lot of the whole "smoking causes cancer" debate. Industry has every incentive to obfuscate the issue to maximize profits. Citizens (and by extension, government) have to balance polluted drinking water against jobs creation and energy independence, and thus is unable to generate enough momentum to slow the process. It doesn't help that our governor has accepted campaign contributions from the very companies he is suppose to regulate.

My gut tells me that in 20 years, we'll find that the fracking fluids have destroyed our aquifers, but by then, the damage is done, and the money is long gone. I'd also point out that the gas has been there for a million years - waiting a few more to study the issue isn't going to cost anything - in fact, the value of the gas is only going to increase as resources become more scarce.

Unfortunately Oil companies don't disclose what chemicals exactly they use, and legally they don't have to, otherwise lawsuits would be a lot easier to bring against these companies.

Most don't anyway; there're a handful bucking industry trends and trying to win the PR war by publishing exactly what they use and spending disproportionately large amounts of money on trying to find greener replacements for the stuff they use.

Lockhaven = Lock Haven, besides that however, I know some people that went to college there that tell me that the company running this operation has already been 'warned' repeatedly for dumping this fracking sludge into the local river...I'm hoping they get shut down.

If these companies spent the money on proper completion techniques that actually isolated the zones they want to produce, there would be no issue. Instead, they want as much gas as possible per well as cheap as possible.

What's causing these aquifer incursions isn't the casing itself (casing doesn't generally leak unless it's decades old and not being kept up with cathodics), it's the cement jobs holding the casing into the ground allowing formation communication, or not enough casing runs to successfully isolate their pay zones. (think of casing like an inverted telescope, wide at the top and for each run gets slightly smaller gauge, they case off different portions of the well to prevent formation communication, and some companies try to get away with less casing than they actually need).

Further, natural formation fractures allow pressure to escape into weaker zones which in turn leak into aquifers. The whole point of fracturing a well is to overpressure the gas-bearing formation to the point of creating fractures that free up more hydrocarbons for production.

If the engineers working on these wells were doing their jobs properly, they'd be planning for this and making sure that they were doing these operations with no impact.. As usual, profits win out in the end.

A properly drilled well should not be doing this. Oil and gas only collect in rocks that have an impermeable barrier above the rock. Otherwise the oil and gas wouldn't collect there - it would migrate up. And the rock with the gas is hundreds if not thousands of feet below the aquifer.

I don't know why gas is showing up. But for it to be the fraking itself, the impermeable rock would have to be strong enough to keep gas trapped for millions of years, but not strong enough to resist the water pressure from fraking.

They are very good at sucking off the public teet, they are excellent at making obscene profits, they just suck at doing the only thing that really counts, extracting resources in a safe and responsible fashion.

Pumping poisonous chemicals thousands of feet into the ground at pressures sufficient to fracture rock formations and contaminate aquifers for miles around . . .

What could possibly go wrong here?

Just to clarify I think what happens is once your fluid is down there you set off a series of explosions. The pressure waves through the liquid fractures the layers of rock. It's not that the liquid itself is being pumped down under high enough pressure to fracture the rock. Someone please correct mean if I'm wrong.

Similar to "Gasland," this article confuses fact with hype. Methane has seeped into shallow aquifers in the Northeast for centuries. Yes, defective well casing can cause this. But, the cases cited in Gasland were entirely attributable to natural seepage from shallow gas sands (not from casing defects). The serious concern is surface spillage, and this is something that responsible operators and regulators can and do control effectively.

The natural gas industry needs to overcome the environmental concerns, but that will happen as time goes on and the facts (rather than spin) actually emerge. Fracking for natural gas certainly needs to be done carefully, but when compared to the huge human toll and environmental devastation of coal mining, and when compared to the amazing cost (financial and military) of importing middle eastern oil, shale gas production is by far the best resource for America's future. For what it's worth, I don't have a personal interest in the natural gas industry, but I've watched fracking up close many times. It's a sound and safe process, when conducted prudently. We shouldn't reach conclusions based on hype, but rather facts.

When you type out all that shit, do you really expect anyone but a fellow industry apologist (or paid PR Internet troll sitting in a cubicle scanning the tubes of the Internets for forums and articles such as this one) to believe a single shred of that crap?

First, did you miss the part about having NO INTEREST in the natural gas industry? Second, you have to be kidding. Are you in 2nd grade? Do you not have the ability to debate a topic, or is ridicule the best you have?